“Ton managed to get the NaN investors to agree on a unique Blender Foundation plan to attempt to open source Blender. The “Free Blender” campaign sought to raise 100,000 EUR, as a one-time fee so that the NaN investors would agree on open sourcing Blender. To everyone’s shock and surprise the campaign reached the 100,000 EUR goal in only seven short weeks.”
So this is unique and incredible I think. For example Kickstarter was founded in 2009! There are others that are older but not much. And 100K EUR in 2002 is more than 100K now. Ok, nowadays a big KS project can reach millions of dollars…
On top of that, it’s plausible to think nobody thought that Blender was going to get the point where its turning the heads of professionals who use commercial software with 4-digit pricetags.
Back when I started using Blender, mesh selection was vertex only (without backface culling), UVmapping was limited to basic projections, the arealamp was the only type that could produce soft shadows, there was no object-mode undo, no hair, no compositing, no fluids or sculpting, no GI, no volumetrics, no modifier stack, no bridge tool, no node systems of any kind, a limited proportional edit tool, the bevel tool beveled everything, the particle system was nothing more than a few basic emission features, there were no simulation tools, animation tools were quite basic compared to today, ect…
Some of these could very still apply to Blender today if not for Ton’s leadership and the passionate developers who have come and gone to improve Blender despite the major gaps it had between it and nearly all of the commercial software (including the mid-tier apps.)
Correction: The area lamp was the only raytraced lamp that could produce soft shadows. Buffered spots were/are more than capable of generating soft shadows. They weren’t necessarily physically accurate, but they could definitely be soft.
